Cruise Control Cable

[budro]

How do you adjust the tension on the cruise control cable? I know it attaches right with the throttle cable. Are there any adjustments on it? Or is it a one piece thing? Its on a 92 ranger 4.0 V6 My cruise holds and works except going up steeper hills it wont kick down the trans. The kickdown cable is fine cause if i give it some gas manually it kicks the a4ld down out of overdrive.

 

[mhughes165]

as far as i know the cruise control isnt supposed to kick down the trans.....its designed so when the system senses a change outside of a small range of gradiant or turns to disengage the system. thats why....nothin u can do about it

 

[fastpakr]

The cruise control will definitely kick down the transmission as necessary.

 

[budro]

thats kind of what i thought. I mean whats the point of cruise if you have to push the gas on every other hill you go up? Every other ford, chevy, dodge vehicle i have ever driven all kicked down going up hills. At least out of overdrive.

 

[mhughes165]

thats kind of what i thought. I mean whats the point of cruise if you have to push the gas on every other hill you go up? Every other ford, chevy, dodge vehicle i have ever driven all kicked down going up hills. At least out of overdrive.

what kind of hill?

 

[mhughes165]

The cruise control will definitely kick down the transmission as necessary.

and i meant kickdown as in when accellerating up a hill to keep speed up, not just kick down one gear.

 

[budro]

Ok i can see where this is going.

It is a steady incline for about a 1/4 mile. what difference does it make? The smoother hills the cruise only looses about 2-3 mph. which is understandable. But going up a longer steeper grade it goes from 70 down to 60 and once it gets to the top it resumes back up to 70.

All other vehicles including rangers i have owned in the past have kicked down out of overdrive after about a 5 mph decrease. If not less.

 

[fastpakr]

and i meant kickdown as in when accellerating up a hill to keep speed up, not just kick down one gear.

I'm not really sure where you're going with this. The system will disengage automatically if it slows more than 10mph below the set speed. However, one of the scripted troubleshooting steps for CC issues is actually verifying that you can force the engine to maintain a speed manually. If so, the issue lies within the CC system, otherwise it's powertrain.

 

[budro]

Yes if i manually give it gas it will keep the speed it needs. So going up a hill without the cruise on I can keep a constant 70mph because it will kick down out of overdrive. On the same hill with the cruise on it will drop to 60mph and never kick down out over overdrive to compensate.

 

[budro]

Update.. the cruise works fine in town with speeds around 35-40mph. Even up some of the tallest hills. Kicksdown to a lower gear to compensate. Could it be related to engine vacuum? I hooked a vacuum pump up to the rubber line going to the cruise from the vacuum tree and it pumped right up and held vacuum. Any other ideas?